Does God Grieve Losing Us Like We Grieve Losing Loved Ones?
by Nanette Sawyer
Gospel Reading: Luke 15:1-10
For Sunday, September 12, 2010: Year C – Ordinary 24
I’m thinking of moments of deep grief that I have experienced or witnessed. They have included wailing, weeping, rocking, holding other people, running, flailing, going completely silent, and turning one’s back to those present in order to hide the expression of grief. The pain and isolation of that one who turned away was as palpable as the one who wailed and fell to her knees. To lose someone we love is to have some part of us broken. The emotions are raw and powerful, and sometimes what we have lost cannot be regained. And then we do our best to heal. But sometimes, we are surprised by joy.
Joy in Regaining the Lost
Taking an example from film, there’s one movie moment emblazoned in my mind from Sense & Sensibility when the sensible sister of the story (played by Emma Thompson) expresses grief, and relief from it, so profoundly that I can’t forget it. In the story, she has been living her own personal grief, believing that the man she loves has married another woman. She has imagined the long, long life before her, living without the one she loves. She pushes her grief down and pushes through her days, pasting a wan smile on her face as she tries to be kind and generous and not burden others with her pain.
One day, however, she is visited by her lost love. Thinking him married, she struggles to be polite, but you can see the stiffness in her body, the emotional struggle to repress her grief. As they talk it suddenly becomes clear that it was not him but his brother who had married. The man professes his
love for her and we see on her face the crumbling of her grief as a new future blossoms into her consciousness. She lets out a sound like a guttural exhale, a primal sob as grief is released and possibility and hope rush in to fill its place in her soul. Joy rushes in.
God is Like a Woman
To say that God is like a woman who has lost one coin doesn’t really capture for me the grief of lost or broken relationship. Perhaps Jesus had to speak in terms that would capture the imaginations of the rich Pharisees. But I do think that in relation to us, God is like a woman (or a shepherd) who has lost a loved one and lost her wholeness. Without the one that is lost, God’s heart is broken. But God doesn’t just want to get back together with the one. God wants to get the one back with the ninety nine (or with the nine) so that whatever community has been broken can be restored to wholeness.
Salvation as Wholeness
Reconciliation makes wholeness, and as Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:19, in Christ God was reconciling the whole world (kosmos) to God’s self. And in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (12:32). God doesn’t only love the majority, or the wholly righteous, but every single one. This is extremely good news for us, given how many times we “miss the mark” and hurt ourselves or our loved ones or the strangers and neighbors all around us. Yet despite our mistakes, our brokenness, or how far we have gone astray, God will not let even one of us stay lost.
And when this wholeness is made complete by regaining that which had been lost, God, like a woman and like a shepherd, “calls together her friends and neighbors saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me’ for I have found” what I had lost. God celebrates in community when brokenness is restored to wholeness.
The Hardest Question
Can you believe that God loves you so much that God will not lose you?
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Nanette Sawyer is the founding pastor of Wicker Park Grace (www.wickerparkgrace.net), an emerging faith community that gathers in an art gallery on the west side of Chicago. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), she has blogged at The Christian Century’s lectionary blog and has been a featured speaker at various events, including Christianity 21 (http://www.jopaproductions.com/christianity-21-faith-21st-century) and The Big Event of RevGalBlogPals (http://revgalblogpals.blogspot.com/2009/10/nanette-sawyer-and-cruise-big-event.html). She has also taught as adjunct faculty at McCormick Theological Seminary, a Reformed, ecumenical, urban, and cross-cultural seminary on the south side of Chicago. She blogs at http://nanettesawyer.wordpress.com/, is a contributor to An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, and the author of Hospitality: The Sacred Art (http://tinyurl.com/hospitality-sacred-art).
